Joe and P.J. came through the bike gate without me hearing them, and suddenly we were standing there face to face, all three of us speechless somehow. I looked for something to cover myself with, but my shirt was on the bed. Withering under P.J.’s gaze, I crippled my way through the briquette machinery and into the house. Joe came after me. I frantically tried to pull on my shirt, but the little sparrow claw was unwilling and the other arm was spasming out of control.
‘Don’t act so pissed off,’ Joe said. ‘How was I supposed to know you were walking around half naked? Here, let me . . .’
I slapped his hand away. It had to be on purpose: the only, the really one and only time I went outside uncovered and he had exposed me to her eyes. Outside, P.J. seized the handle of the press and pulled it down. She was less pale than usual, her skin was now the lightest shade of beige, her eyes an even more whopping turquoise. Later I heard that she’d been to a Greek island with Lover Boy Writer.
Joe had come by to ask me to go along to collect his things in Enschede. P.J. would be going too. We had to pick up Engel first, at Ferry Island. He buttoned my shirt for me, murmuring, ‘Mean-tempered bastard’ as he did. The black T-shirt he wore had DEWALT written on it in yellow letters.
‘Hello, Frankie,’ P.J. said when I came outside. ‘Sorry if we gave you a fright.’
It was the first time she’d ever spoken directly to me. I saw Ma looking out the living-room window and waved to her. When she appeared at the kitchen door I made a drinking gesture. She said hello to Joe and introduced herself to P.J., ‘but I’ve seen you before, of course’. They were an unlikely contrast, this worldly girl and Ma, that rough monument of care and industry. Although they seemed to speak the same language, I was sure that if you sat them down for an hour at the kitchen table together an abrupt end would come to the vocabulary they both understood, they would reach the outer limits of the things both of them could imagine.
I repeated the drinking gesture.
‘Would you like some coffee, or tea? Or something else? Something cold? Both coffee? I’ll just make a little then, it will be done in a jiffy, no, no problem at all. Cream, sugar? Both black? Well, that should be easy to remember.’
I felt like scratching, my back was itching badly, aggravated by Ma’s blank inertia and the cross-examination that had to go before a plain old cup of coffee. P.J. asked me a jumble of questions about producing briquettes, the answers to which I wrote on my notepad without meeting her eye.
‘You have nice handwriting,’ P.J. said as Ma brought the coffee.
‘He writes everything down,’ Ma hastened to say. ‘You name it. He sits there writing all day long. Frankie, come on, show the young lady your books! His whole wall is covered in them.’
I hissed at her like a cornered serpent, but P.J.’s curiosity had been aroused.
‘That’s pretty special,’ she said, ‘a guy who keeps a diary.’
Ma, who had backed off to the kitchen door, nodded and wrung her hands in that way of hers that made me feel bad about myself. P.J. asked if she could see the diaries. I led her into the house and pointed to them.
‘Are these the ones?’ she asked.
Her finger, the same one with which she had scared the daylights out of Mousetown, slid across the bindings of ninety-two chronologically arranged hardback notebooks, for which I was the sole customer at Praamstra’s bookshop. She turned to face me.
‘I don’t suppose I could . . . ?’
I shook my head.
‘I didn’t think so.’
She knelt down beside the shelf containing the earliest years and sighed.
‘What’s in them – I mean, is it all personal or is it also about the outside world?’
I made a sound of assent.
‘Both?’
I nodded. She stood up.
‘My boyfriend, did you know that he’s a writer? I bet Joe told you. Arthur would love this. Oh, Frankie, can’t I look at just one page, please?’
There was a predatory glimmer in her eyes. She was warming me up to dangerous heights. I knew that nothing would be impossible for her, no one can resist beauty with a will. I pulled out a notebook at random, laid it on my lap and flipped through it until I found an innocuous passage: lots of Joe, the start of winter and a difficult day at school. I handed it to her. She sighed again.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she said after a while, ‘really beautiful. Your handwriting, so much . . . orderliness, and a whole bookcase full of it. I’ve never seen anything like it, this has to be the book of everything. That you, I mean who would have thought, that you just write and write, that you see everything but don’t say a thing.’
Definition of God, I scribbled, and for the first time tasted the delight of her laugh. She closed the book and put it back between the other two.
‘And what about me, is there anything in there about me?’
What could I say? If I confirmed it she would want to know what I had written about her, if I denied it I would be denying my love and disappointing her. A spasm came and ebbed away, I wrote:
The facts
arrival in Lomark 1993
grade-point average: 8.4
Jopie K.
‘You looked at my grades! But, by the way: it was an eight point five.’
I shook my head, made a column with her final marks, averaged them and came up with 8.4. (Yes, she was impressed.)
Ma watched from the window as we pulled away. I was sitting up front in my own cart, P.J. sat on a blanket in the back because there was no seat there, only the rails they’d used to slide the coffins in and out.
‘Your mother’s so sweet,’ she said.
We picked up Engel and drove out of Lomark. Combines were bringing in grain from the fields, swarms of gulls followed the machines like a fleet of fishing boats. Light-yellow wisps of dust hung in the air.
P.J. asked Joe to open the back window (electric), then stuck her bare feet outside. She lay on her back, resting her head on her arms, her sweater had slid up and left her tummy bare. I saw the shape of her breasts. Engel was listening to Joe’s theory about Papa Africa’s odyssey. The hypotheses had now been further refined: on the Internet Joe had looked at the weather maps and traced his stepfather’s possible route. There had been no major storms in August or September of last year.
For the duration of that drive I was dazed by the recurring sense that something good was about to happen. I rolled down the window a little, the earth smelled of hot dust and grass. Engel talked louder above the wind.
Somewhere in the course of that slow, fluid day we got to his house in Enschede, in a working-class neighbourhood built entirely of red brick. Fat people were sitting on the stoop in garden chairs, unreal numbers of washed-out children were slurping at soft drinks.
‘Welcome to the barbecue barrio,’ Engel grinned. ‘The grease pit for all your super-discount shopping needs.’
P.J. was horrified.
‘Haven’t they ever heard of calories around here?’
A neighbour raised a swing-top bottle of Grolsch in greeting, I could see the wet plucks of hair in his armpit.
‘Hey, Engel, them’s friends a yurn? Take a load off, mister, join us f’r a wee Pilsner.’
Engel lived on the second floor, when he opened the doors to the balcony we saw back gardens full of plastic furniture and obnoxious piles of toys.
There was a half-litre of supermarket rosé in the cupboard, but no straw. Engel poured it into teacups. P.J. said, ‘Come on, let me help with that’ and held the cup to my lips like a mother. I drank and looked greedily, she was so close that over the edge of the cup I could see the light summer freckles on the bridge of her nose. I drank it all at one go.
‘Boy,’ she said.
‘It’s medicinal,’ Joe explained, ‘it keeps him from shaking. I bet you’d like another one, wouldn’t you, Frankie?’
I grinned.
‘Well, you heard the man.’
There was an unmistakable rumble
of thunder in the distance, and Joe began collecting his things. A sleeping bag, his father’s knapsack, a folder with sketches and two clay sculptures representing machines you’d expect to see on a building site.
‘Your pans,’ Engel said, ‘don’t forget your pans.’
Joe put everything in the car and said we had to get going.
‘We need to be home by dark, the headlights don’t work yet.’
P.J. tossed the last glass of rosé down my gullet, the way she cared for me did me good. Engel was staying in Enschede and waved to us as we drove off. The thunder and lightning were close now, the sky above the city had turned to mica. Engel waved until we turned the corner. It was the last time I saw him alive.
The next weekend Joe came by to pick me up on his way to the junkyard: he needed parts for the hearse’s cooling and electrical system. With a sort of dramatic affirmation I realized that this was the first time I’d been to the yard since the accident. The operating capacity had grown by 50 percent in the last couple of years, there was a new press for car wrecks, and the waste-separation methods had become more sophisticated. That might sound high-tech, but the basic business was the same as ever: wrecks and old junk. Still, it wasn’t the kind of bidonville you might expect; all the waste was separated and the used oil was neatly collected and disposed of. ISO 9000 certification, Hermans & Sons, let there be no mistake about that. I always thought that was funny, that Pa wanted to have the kind of proper junkyard that people would feel good about coming to, like a slaughterhouse without the bloodstains.
Joe parked close to the front office. There, inside, was the social heart of the enterprise: the coffee and powdered-soup dispenser. Joe opened the door on my side, I swung myself out of the cart and he unloaded it. He rolled me over the rusty metal plates into the yard. I looked around, but nowhere did I see a sign reading BRIQUETTES FOR SALE, which made me wonder how Pa actually brought them to people’s attention.
Dirk was running the mobile crane. In its jaws was a freshly crushed wreck, which he manoeuvred into place with pinpoint accuracy atop a pile of other wrecks. The press flattened the car bodies until they were only thirty centimetres thick, the noise it made was like an accident in slow motion. When Dirk caught sight of us, the wreck stopped, swaying, in midair.
‘PA’S IN THERE!’ he roared.
‘Man, has he ever gotten fat,’ Joe said quietly.
We were at a safe enough distance for unfavourable remarks about Dirk’s appearance. My brother had grown fat, not in the gradual way that makes the skin glow a friendly pink, but explosively fat, without giving his surroundings a chance to get used to his new shapes. He had red spots on his neck and acne rosacea on his cheeks from the high blood pressure. Old Dirk had at last started resembling what he had always been: a weird, cracker-barrel alcoholic who smelled faintly of loneliness.
We went into the stripping shed. Coming from a mezzanine floor covered in metre-high crates we heard the sound – amplified to the power of ten – of someone searching irritably for a little wrench at the very bottom of a metal toolbox.
‘Anybody home?!’ Joe shouted.
The racket stopped, Pa appeared.
‘Boys.’
The tail end of a rice-paper rollup was stuck to his lower lip. I’d once seen him toss a butt like that on the ground, where it landed on the wet nicotine gob and remained standing upright. Pa came down the steps on his leather clogs.
‘What can I do for you?’ he said to Joe.
His false teeth radiated light in the dusky shed.
‘Well . . .’ Joe began.
That was when I saw Pa stiffen in fright. Not a big fright, just an explosion on the seabed far below. I was trained in reading such micro-expressions. His eyes darted to and fro between me and something behind me. I turned my head as far as I could, but the angle was too sharp. Seizing the handle of my cart I twisted the front wheels around and turned ninety degrees. The back wall was in the shadows, but I could still see it with paralyzing sharpness: a tower of paper briquettes . . . piled up against the brick wall. One thousand, two thousand, ten thousand, who’s to say.
A long, cold shiver ran through me. The briquettes were neatly piled up, as though to form a wall of insulation. All this time Pa had barely sold a single briquette, but he had kept paying me for more and more of them, ‘It’s like they’re eating those things for breakfast, Frankie,’ and the price he paid for his failed business instinct had been my weekly wage – to give me a goddamned sense of self-worth or whatever it was those two had tried to palm off on me.
Pa coughed like an engine on a cold morning. That was the most horrible thing about it, that he was as embarrassed about the situation as I was. I heard Joe ask him something about a radiator, so far away that it sounded like he was in a different room. Pa was silent with despair, I saw my own shame reflected in his eyes, and we stood there gaping at each other in that hall of shameful mirrors.
‘OK,’ said Joe, ‘then I’ll just wait for a while.’
I left the stripping shed and went to the car. Dried mud crunched beneath my wheels. A few minutes later Joe came out of the shed carrying a hammer and a screwdriver and gestured to me that he’d be there in a minute. The car radio was tuned to the weather report. They were talking about rain.
Sword
What was left but to try and become an arm wrestler? I went into training; Joe and I set our sights on the first tournament in Liege, in late October. Dumbbells were brought into the house and Joe got a good deal on a batch of protein supplements in the flavours strawberry, vanilla and lemon. In powder form, to mix with milk. The flavours had more to do with colour than with fruit; they were all identically sweet and creamy, with an aftertaste like chalk.
The most important weight training I did while sitting on the floor: with my elbow on a low table and a dumbbell in my hand, I curled the weight up toward me slowly, then lowered it again until right above the tabletop, keeping up the tension all the time to stimulate the muscles to maintain maximum force. I had to keep doing that until flames shot out of my arm. We’d started with sixteen kilos and three sets of twenty repetitions, with a thirty-second break between each set. Gradually the number of reps decreased and more metal discs were added to the dumbbell. Five weeks later I had thirty-eight kilos hanging on the thing, which is a lot of weight for an exercise aimed only at the biceps. My forearm I trained with wrist curls, a minute flexing of the wrist with weights in hand.
I lived on a diet prepared by Ma and strictly monitored by Joe. My face grew thinner (Ma’s perception: worried) and my arm and upper body grew heavier (Joe’s perception: enthused). Because there were only so many repetitions I could do, I also propelled myself each day back and forth between Lomark and Westerveld. That was a journey of 4.2 kilometres out and 4.7 back, because on the way home I always rode past the White House, where P.J.’s parents lived. The house hadn’t been white for years, though, and the thatched roof was dark brown, mossy and in need of replacement. Even after all this time, my primal fantasy concerning the women of that house seemed possessed of an auto-regenerative force. One could say that I went sniffing around there each day like a dog, drawn by lures more powerful than any visual stimuli. One could also say that I was bored to death and wanted to fill my head with sweet illusions, and that I hated myself for it afterwards because it violated my abstinence from deranging ‘P.J. things’.
As a result of all the heavy training, my sleeve now contained an elephant’s leg in miniature. It was completely out of proportion to the rest of my body, but then again: symmetry had gone out the window years ago. Joe did a lot of reading-up on ways to make me not only stronger, but also heavier. That resulted in an additional eleven kilos. Eleven kilos. That added up to a total of sixty-four, which meant that my heaviest opponents could outweigh me by more than twenty kilos, for the lightweight category went up to eighty-five. Even if I stuffed my face morning, noon and night I would always remain an extremely light lightweight. I consulted Musashi about
this, but nowhere did he say anything about the ideal weight of the true samurai.
I concentrated on rereading the essays ‘Water’ and ‘Fire’ in Go Rin No Sho. They’re not so much about strategy, but are of a more practical nature in instructing the reader in the way one should fight. Written by a man who, at the age of fifty-nine, had never lost a single fight.
When I’d read the book as a youngster I had revered it as a kind of Bible: this was the world of Kensei, the Sword Saint. But I had also understood only the topmost layer of what he was talking about, the things that stimulated knightly fantasies, if only because of the names of the tactics you could use to defeat your enemies. The Fire and Stones Cut, for example. That one I had tried out on Quincy Hansen in the schoolyard, and with my broomstick sword broke the defences of his book-bag shield. And, lest I forget, there was the Body of a Rock, which I practiced without an opponent: ‘When you master the Way of this strategy, your body can suddenly change to rock. The Ten Thousand Things are then powerless against you. That is the body of a rock. No one can move you.’
I was practicing the Body of a Rock on the day of the cyclomowers. I thought I had found the liberating gravity of which he spoke. The tractor approached, I remained in place. I should have known better; Musashi himself says that unripe strategy produces sorrow.
Now, these many years later, I read it all again but it seemed to say something very different. The Book of Five Rings was like a gobstopper that changed colour all the time. Now I could apply it to defeat arm wrestlers. Wherever it said ‘sword’ I took the liberty of reading ‘arm’. That wasn’t actually so far-fetched, for what is a sword if not a sharp and artfully styled extension of the arm? With ‘sword’, Musashi himself probably meant other things as well, for he defeated his most daunting opponent, Sasaki Kojiro, with an oar. The whole point is the spirit of things, the word is merely a beast of burden with ever-changing meanings on its back.
Joe Speedboat Page 17
